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Microsoft Patch Tuesday – February 2012

Posted February 14, 2012 Chris Silva

Ahh Valentine’s Day. Time to leave work early, buy a box of chocolates for your loved one, and fight through the crowds for a table at your favorite restaurant. Or, if you happen to be gainfully employed in IT security, time to spend the evening at work with your coworkers, patching servers and drinking a case of Mountain Dew. Much thanks to Microsoft and the Gregorian calendar for making Patch Tuesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same date. At least it won’t happen again until 2017, right? Try to explain that one to your better half.

To make up for it, Microsoft showered love on the Windows Kernel, Internet Explorer, the C Run-Time Library and .NET – each of which received patches to fix potential remote code execution vulnerabilities. The most noteworthy of these might be CVE-2011-5046, found in MS12-008, which deals with the highly publicized Windows 7 BSoD that when disclosed was first triggered by Apple Safari.

To spread the love around, Visio, SharePoint, the Indeo Codec, the Ancillary Function Driver, and the Color Control Panel also received patches. Yes, you read that correctly, the good old Color Control Panel was patched to protect from DLL Hijacking vulnerabilities. That patch, along with the one associated with the Indeo Codec, bring the grand total of DLL Hijacking related Microsoft Security Advisories to 23. As a reminder, even after patching it is a good idea to follow the mitigation steps outlined in KB2269637 as numerous other third-party software products are affected and unpatched.

In a misguided attempt to gain your affection, Oracle also released a patch for Java today. It contains 14 new security fixes, and Oracle recommends that customers apply the patch as soon as possible.

Want to learn more about these vulnerabilities? Have a question about a security topic or event from the last month? Need help explaining why you had to miss Valentine’s Day to your wife / girlfriend / husband / boyfriend / cat / goldfish? If so, join the eEye Research Team tomorrow for another episode of the Vulnerability Expert Forum (VEF).

MS12-009 – Vulnerabilities in Ancillary Function Driver Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2645640)
Recommendation: Deploy patches as soon as possible, since no mitigation is available.

MS12-011 – Vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Could Allow Elevation of Privilege (2663841)
Recommendation: Deploy patches as soon as possible. Until the patch can be installed, enable the XSS filter in Internet Explorer (available in versions 8 and higher).

MS12-012 – Vulnerability in Color Control Panel Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2643719)
Recommendation: Deploy patches as soon as possible. Until the patch can be installed, block ports 139 and 445 at the perimeter firewall, prevent the WebClient service from running, and prevent DLLs from being loaded from WebDAV and remote shares.

MS12-014 – Vulnerability in Indeo Codec Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2661637)
Recommendation: Deploy patches as soon as possible. Until the patch can be installed, block ports 139 and 445 at the perimeter firewall, prevent the WebClient service from running, and prevent DLLs from being loaded from WebDAV and remote shares.

In this webinar, SANS Instructor and Founder of Voodoo Security, Dave Shackleford, will revisit several hacking and breach scenarios that involved privileged accounts, and use these as examples while discussing tools and tactics to get this problem under control once and for all.

There’s plenty of problems we don’t have great options for in InfoSec today. Malware is a pain point that keeps evolving rapidly. 0-day exploits are tough to prepare for. Privileged account management? We got this. We know the root causes, we know how it manifests, we know how to get it under control effectively, and there are great technology solutions that are enterprise-class.